Facebook is working on ‘Private Profiles’ and 'Instant videos'; may add voice assistant to its mobile apps

Social media giant Facebook is working on a new type of profile called the ‘Private Profile’.

Image Credit: The Next Web

According to a report by The Next Web, the company is testing this new feature and may introduce it for everyone in a stable update moving forward. This new type of profile is likely to be limited to a close circle of friends instead of everyone added in your friend list.

This new feature was spotted in the beta version of their mobile app for Android. It shows a full screen prompt to a user asking them to "Create a Private Profile’. The description on the prompt states ‘Some things are best shared to a small circle. Create a profile to share with your best friends’. One thing to note here is that the ‘Create a Private Profile’ button on this prompt is not working at the time of writing so we don’t know what a ‘private profile’ will comprise of and the implementation of the private profile.

It is likely that the private profile will be a separate section in the official app and it is also possible that the content from the private profile is integrated into the normal newsfeed on Facebook. This is not the only new feature that Facebook is working on and other features under testing include ‘instant video’, where users don’t need to download the video and see it directly. Facebook is also making changes to its app, including a feature — in a nod to Snapchat — that can detect when a screenshot is taken.

Last but not the least, Facebook may also be planning to bring a voice assistant for its mobile app. It may not exactly mean that the company is working on an AI assistant to compete with Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa and Cortana, but it might be a voice-based assistant for search. Considering that these features are currently under testing, it is unclear if all these features will make their way to the stable version of Android.